Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II

This book is about what the author calls one of the “lost stories” of World War II. Through impressive, even massive research in the United States archives and the records of six other countries (Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Germany, Guatemala, and Switzerland), the author recounts how the U.S. government convinced governments in Latin America to expel Germans or people of German descent as threats to hemispheric security, along with smaller numbers of Japanese and Italians, so that they could be interned without trial in camps in the United States. In all, more than four thousand Germans, two thousand Japanese, and nearly three hundred Italians were deported and interned without due process. At first, the United States tried to repatriate them all, including the few German Jews, to Germany, but that effort collapsed for several reasons, not the least of which was that the United States refused to exchange German internees...